H1 - Developing a hierarchical high school research pipeline to broaden participation in STEM disciplines

Introduction: : High school research pipeline programs serve many roles in heightening the awareness of all students to STEM careers. From providing authentic research experiences to preparing students for the unspoken norms and implicit lessons of higher education, students report an increased sense of belonging and preparation for undergraduate and postgraduate careers upon completion of these programs. A critical component of these pipeline programs is the direct mentorship of high school students, usually by graduate students who prepare research projects and supervise their mentees throughout each week. However, STEM graduate students are not typically trained to lead mentorship experiences, which require necessary skills such as project management, communication of difficult and complex topics, and wellness, as they are assumed to be ‘born mentors’. This mentality leads to a lack of preparation that can limit the cultivation of a student-focused and collaborative environment fundamental to learning and growth, proving detrimental to the experiences of both the mentor and the mentee and their ability to develop as scientists and engineers. This has been highlighted in previous work regarding teaching and learning assistants’ lack of self-efficacy. We noticed a similar trend as part of our high school outreach effort, the Duke Research in Engineering Program (DukeREP), where mentors felt a lack of understanding of the experiences of their mentees and a desire to better understand how empathetic, engaging, student-focused, and pedagogically sound practices enhance the mentor-mentee relationship.

Materials and

Methods: : To address this challenge, our group of DukeREP Ph.D. student leaders and faculty collaboratively designed a credit-bearing course BME790: Inclusive Engineering Leadership, that is offered in the summer before the start of the mentorship program. In developing this course, we generated a concept mapping framework to coalesce on four key themes that encompass mentorship best practices, with Mentoring as Teaching, Leadership and Character, Community Building, and Wellness and Mental Health, as the overarching motifs. Concept mapping led to a backward and student-focused design approach to identify our learning objectives and deliverables, which form a mentorship portfolio that can be directly employed during the program and serve as an archive for future career employment opportunities. These deliverables include a recorded microteaching lesson, a shared expectations document, reflections on teaching approaches, curriculum design, the local community, and implicit bias association tests, and a catalog of mental health and wellness resources. To expand the reach of this broadly applicable course, it is open to all graduate students who participate in any form of mentorship, such as mentoring high school undergraduate students or serving as a teaching assistant.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: DukeREP has made significant contributions to the high school research pipeline, broadening participation in STEM. Out of 23 eligible DukeREP alumni, 21 (91%) currently attend an undergraduate or graduate school program, including MIT, Duke University, Cornell, UC Berkeley, Purdue, and Georgia Tech, and the remaining individuals hold full-time positions in the workforce. Confirming the success of the pipeline, 16 out of 19 (84%) students are pursuing a STEM degree with 11 (58%) in engineering and 2 (11%) in BME/bioengineering.

We expect that the implementation of the mentorship course will strengthen DukeREP’s STEM research pipeline, promoting broader participation and increasing student academic and professional preparedness. To date, we have successfully taught and trained 16 graduate student mentors with the BME790 course. Harnessing reflections and experiential activities that focus on the course’s key themes and directly applying them and the course content to each student’s individual mentoring experience, we help develop and grow empathetic, student-focused, and effective mentors. The incorporation of guest lectures/seminars facilitates a connection to the university, emphasizing that mentorship is a shared effort while providing resources that can be leveraged. We also use student reflections at intermediate and final stages to evaluate how inclusive practices, building a portfolio, and immediate application to a mentorship experience leads to better outcomes for high school mentees in their future as STEM students. Current reflections demonstrate the immediate need to introduce leadership and mentorship to graduate student training. Our future directions include measuring mentor and mentee outcomes with respect to improved mentorship practices and longitudinally measuring the success of DukeREP and our course for high school students as they pursue higher education. To expand the impact of the course, materials will be shared with the broader BME and STEM community to allow others to develop these courses for their graduate trainees.

Taken together, the mentorship course will improve DukeREP’s outcomes and contribute to the high school research pipeline by broadening participation in STEM, increasing student preparation for academic and professional success, and providing a leadership and mentorship course design that the broader STEM community can develop for their graduate trainees.

Acknowledgements and/or References (Optional):: We thank all DukeREP officers, faculty, mentors, module instructors, and interns for enabling the program and course to be a success. We acknowledge financial support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Student STEM Enrichment Program, Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and BME Department, and the Duke Graduate School.